Our mom says that "anything's possible if you put your mind to it," and she's never wrong, so we're fairly certain that there is some way to transform human poop into gold. But mixing the poop with fertilizer and putting it on a heater is not that way, as Irish wannabe wizard Paul Moran recently discovered.

Moran got the idea somewhere (scat fairy tale book? satirical alchemy zine? Michele Bachmann? Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain?) that if he just heated up some poop-ilizer on his electric heater, it would transform into a glittering precious metal. But as the Belfast Telegraphtells us, Moran's experiment totally failed. Shocking, I know! Instead it created a mass of orange flames that burned up part of his apartment and caused several thousand pounds' worth of damage. Moran was arrested for arson and was just sentenced to three months in jail by a judge who found his experiment "interesting" but bizarre.

Moran's reportedly on anti-psychotic meds now, so hopefully when he gets out of jail he won't try to bake his poop into a pile of diamonds or a platinum bar. It's okay if he uses it for bike fuel, though.